Every day there is someone somewhere watering a plant in their garden; and along with them are the gardening enthusiasts, who out of love for their little botanical friends, are diligently applying fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. One outcome these well-meaning groups have in common is this: more-often-than-not they watch helplessly as much of the needed water, and gardening additives, flow to surrounding areas and away from the plant for which they were intended. And in today's world water has become a commodity, and its conservation is of the utmost importance.
There have been attempts at correcting this seemingly universal problem for gardeners for many years. The most common solution was to build up a bowl-shaped mound of soil around the base of the plant, commonly referred to as a watering-well, to contain the water long enough for it to percolate down to the plant's roots. A few of the other solutions are the use of mulches piled around the plant in the hopes of retaining moisture, or stones sunk into the soil around the plant as a border, or to simply place the plant several inches below ground level.
Unfortunately, the aforementioned so-called solutions, along with many others fail soon after their implementation. Soil watering-wells absorb water laterally as well as gravitationally. The very act of watering erodes away the soil watering-well. And as the soil surface gets drier the water has less time to saturate before it becomes wasteful runoff and often, taking with it, gardening chemicals such as fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.
Mulch mounds are not much better at solving the issue—in fact, they can exacerbate the problem of garden chemical products like pesticides and herbicide runoff. Mulches are breeding grounds for pests like earwigs and pill-bugs to name a few, which encourages greater use of pesticides which then accumulates in the mulches; and mulches tend to float, and flow, with water runoff from over watering and large downpours of rain. These so-called solution failures are typical of the other solutions as well as those not mentioned. The worst consequence of these runoffs is the gardening chemicals used to help grow and protect our garden plants can end up flowing into street gutters, streams, ponds and other environmentally sensitive areas.
Although there are various methods of trying to prevent water and chemical runoff, all, or almost all suffer from one, or more than one disadvantage. Therefore, there is a need to provide methods and apparatus for improved and more secure methods for the prevention of wasteful water runoff, and the containment of useful gardening products, to prevent them from becoming a detriment and danger to their surrounding environments.
As long as there are plants and water there will be gardening, and gardening is here stay, and it can be done more effectively and environmentally friendly.